Ethiopia to help East Africa to record coffee harvest

Ethiopia’s coffee harvest is to hit a record high next season, helping the East Africa region to a record crop, and spurring expectations of the area’s strongest exports in 20 years.

Ethiopia – the fifth-ranked coffee producer, where the crop is believed to have originated – will harvest 6.51m bags of all-arabica beans in 2015-16, the US Department of Agriculture bureau in Addis Ababa said.

While short of hopes of Ethiopia’s government, which had hoped that output would hit 7.7m bags by 2014-15 as farmers improve on “quite low” yields of 0.7-0.8 tonnes per hectare, the harvest at this level would extend a long-term run of gentle increase.